


wake in sunlight

by ninemoons42



Series: l'amoureux [2]
Category: Penny Dreadful (TV), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Romance, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gothic, Healing, Hurt Cassian Andor, Supernatural Elements, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Werewolf Cassian, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 01:42:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12121809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Cassian wakes up from a night of the Change.Someone's already helping him to heal.





	wake in sunlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [widdershins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/widdershins/gifts).



The dreary, exhausted familiarity of stupor, and the slow long climb back to waking -- waking, this time, in a room with the curtains thrown wide open.

Waking as the man and not as the beast that lived in the moonlit hours.

In a room with windows: and the dozen and more bedchambers of Grandage-Desert Place are mostly unoccupied, mostly left to themselves to gather dust and the choking spiderwebs of conscious forgetting, of deliberate oblivion, but not this one.

He doesn’t need to open his eyes to know which rooms this particular chamber might connect to, or whose shadow flits across the windows with their drapery and their sills thrown wide open to admit the stinks of the city, lessened by the distance and the stone walls, the stone streets. To admit the faintest sea-breezes from the great docks, laden with salt and the faraway cries of the ocean-wayfaring birds. To admit the noise and the hustle of the great world beyond the wrought-iron gates and the guarded cul-de-sacs.

A shadow that creates little noise, but he can’t help but turn blindly toward it anyway: for a moment, he thinks he hears the soft murmur and buzz of cards, shuffled and reshuffled and still somehow crisp and uncreased despite frequent use. The rattle of pages being turned -- in a book or in a diary or in a folio of some kind -- and the scratching of a pen, the quiet ring of metal nib tapped gently against heavy glass bottle. 

Once or twice, the thump of satchels and the clank of glass bottles, and even when he’s waking up in this serenity of atmosphere, in this serenity of a presence that he’s coming to know and coming to get used to, the idea of medical attention is abhorrent to him -- mostly because he knows all too well he himself is not only abhorrent but also abhorrently interesting to any quack who might be glancing in his direction.

But there is a slight weight on his wrist, an almost gentle curve of fingers upon his skin and the blood that beats its beast’s pulse beneath, and he can’t help but almost calm. 

Almost.

But -- his instincts. And those he must listen to. He’s made peace with them. He’s learned to listen to them. To ascertain pain and the locations thereof, and some way or another of banishing it. 

He can still smell blood on his hands.

The reek of rust and the entrails, spilled hot and steaming, for a moment so overwhelming, so that he swallows and thinks he has a mouthful to wash down as well -- 

“Here,” says a cool voice, gentle only because it’s quiet. 

When he hears that voice, it trembles.

Oh, not _her_ : for she stands like an obelisk, like a monolith, proud against the wind and against the storm and against the roar of the thunder, the screams ringing out in the night that are cold enough to freeze the blood. Only recently has she introduced touches of color into her mourning weeds: deep purple, dusky blue, and green like fens in the cold moments after dusk. Her spider-cameo, the black ribbon tied around her throat, the sweep of jet-beads in the lustrous darkness of her long hair -- those are the pieces of her, the tall and proud pieces of her.

Only her voice trembles.

Warmth at his lips. He lets his head fall back onto whatever on this bed has been holding him. Cushions stacked to support his neck and his raised foot. Soft lace and embroidery against the rest of him, discreet cover, and perhaps a way of concealing his terrible scars, his gore-soaked self, from view. He bares his throat to her, willingly, and a trickle of tea pours onto his tongue, faintly scented with lavender, gently honeyed. He swallows, laps up another draught, and another, and the teacup -- it must be a teacup -- is empty.

“More?”

How strangely gentle she is, that savage woman with the spiders in her eyes, the spider hovering over her heart.

And not just to him.

Fevered flashes in his mind.

The laughter beneath her stern glance as she observes her brother, hard at his work and surrounded by the books that she will not read, but which she seems to know too well, if the quiet asides are any indication -- the way she shapes the chapter-and-verse citations, the way her mouth tightens for only a moment, before all her disdain is swept away and her hand lands upon her brother’s rounded shoulder, reassuring, warm and sweet.

(The smile in that brother’s face, though he and she part after another skillful duel of words and logic: even when he loses to her, he only looks as exhilarated as though he’s been running out on the moors by her side, the two of them dashing wild and brave over grassy fields, her skirts and his coats no hindrance to the way they catch and release each other’s hands.)

The way she moves when one or both of her protectors appears in some room or another: they never announce themselves, they never send word that they are coming to her, and yet she seems to bloom and turn towards them, like flowers greeting the sun as it moves in stately procession in the sky. She never seems to turn them away, not even when her hands shake in their trepidation. 

(She seems to turn toward them even more, when the fears and the pain and the horrors wrack her battered mind -- and what affection she bestows upon them they return a hundredfold and more. The one with the staff: he is her guide. The one with the swords: he is her shelter. And they turn towards her in their own ways. The unexpected gift of a box of bonbons at the breakfast table -- and the very presence of the torte in pride of place at that same table. What was the most recent one? Ah, he remembers now: a stack of five perfectly squared layers of pale brown, as precisely aligned as though they had been cut with a straightedge, and heaped between them, such richly clotted cream, suffused with sugared nuts. Shards of rock-caramel on top, shattered into glittering sweet crystals. The gleam of that melted caramel at the corner of her mouth, clinging stubbornly, even after she’d finished her tea and touched a napkin to her cream-whorled lips.)

The grave way in which she turns to regard what he thinks of as her weapons, as her arsenal. Many and strange things that she carries with her, within her, that he cannot understand: and chief among those weapons the deck of her cards. He thinks he understands why no one else can touch the squared-off pieces of paper with their rough-sketched scenes, the garish colors against her pale skin and her dark sleeves; what he admits he can’t understand is the idea of her seeing strange meanings in the juxtapositions of the cards as she draws them to create one or another of her favored spreads -- the one with the crossed cards, perhaps, or the one of three in a line, or even just when she fans all the cards out with their blank black backs and then turns a single one over.

(Once and only once she’d read the cards for him: the first night he’d come to spend in Grandage-Desert. He can still recall the smell of Sir Baze’s cigar and the green tinge in its flame when he’d lit it to inhale. And he, Cassian, facing Jyn as she swept aside the plates of her sparse repast; as she shuffled her cards and in a swift spare arc fanned them all out for him, faces down to the lace of the tablecloth. Pick only one, she’d said, and he’d had no patience for the exercise, had shaken his head and shrugged his shoulders. Stabbed at one card at random, not at all seeing that there was sense in following her direction. He can still recall the momentary disbelief in her eyes, seeing that he had actually picked two cards and not just one: the Lovers, and hidden immediately beneath it, clinging to it, the Tower. She would not tell him why she was shocked.)

Tea, again, at his mouth, and he can feel the heat wafting off of it, like steam, but in her presence he isn’t harmed or scorched by that heat. Instead of feeling lassitude and weakness, the heat of the tea pours renewal into him, pours new strength seemingly straight into his heart.

Strength enough to turn his head. To open his eyes.

Strength enough to raise one hand, enough to capture the fingertips holding the teacup to his mouth.

He’s expecting her to pull away -- she doesn’t.

All she says is, “Do you want to finish that?”

He makes himself reply. “I fear I’ll waste away, and blow to pieces, if I don’t.”

“Such a change from the man who craved naught but coffee.”

He knows he’s looking at her as though she’d hung the stars in the sky, and he knows his expressions will be plain on his face for anyone to see: he keeps looking at her anyway, even when he knows that she knows, even when the dull red begins to creep into her cheeks.

But he can’t look away, and part of that is because she won’t.

Gently, slowly, she lets him drink the cup dry once again -- and he watches her hands as she finds the saucer from somewhere else on the bed, somewhere near her perch, and places the cup into it with nary a sound to mark the movement.

“Any more, and you will likely need the facilities -- and there is no one here right now, so I will not be sufficient to assist you thence,” she says.

“I’ll crawl,” he says.

And he means it: to go about on all fours at her side, and to settle next to her feet if she would allow it.

(The memory of a recent night is scented with the smoke from the cheroots that she very occasionally indulges in. Burr of roasted leaf and the wisps of her every breath, visibly framing her worn mouth and her tired red-rimmed eyes. He remembers taking the cigarette holder from her loose hand, after she’d fallen asleep while waiting for her fathers to return from some errand or another. He remembers the unexpected sight of her buttoned shoe falling to the rugs beneath her settee, and the stark tiny shape of her foot, black-stocking-stretch against the chintz of the furniture. He remembers moving from the armchair that he’d appropriated to the spot of rug next to her, and he remembers the weight of her foot as he fitted his leg beneath it: the arch from heel to toe against the rough fabric of his trousers.)

The flash in her eyes in the here-and-now is not of alarm, nor of avarice: she only flashes curiosity at him.

He turns away as he usually does.

And he doesn’t ask for any more tea.

Struggling to sit up is an effective distraction: he needs to apprise himself of his current situation. Here are the bandages winding around his middle, though he can already feel that his flesh is knitting itself properly back together. Here is the linen packed into the wound that has split the skin of his lower leg wide open, though he doesn’t feel any sharp lingering edges of stitching, so he has perhaps been spared the agony of sutures. Here are the marks in the crook of his elbow that speak to whatever was injected into him. 

“Only something to help you sleep -- we feared you would spit the medicine out,” Jyn says.

He steels himself to look away from those reddened points in his skin. 

Pop and crackle of the log in the fireplace falling into pieces.

Windows, flung wide open.

“Whose chambers were these?”

Hitch of her shoulder. “They were opened for guests, when once we had occasion to have them.”

Perhaps that accounts for the plumpness of the cushions, the softness of the bed beneath him. 

“I asked them to place a plank of wood between the quilts,” she’s saying now, a grave smile playing on her mouth. “To make you feel comfortable. You prefer to sleep on hard cots -- I thought that a plank would remind you of your own bed, that it would help you sleep. Sadly, I was overriden. My apologies.”

“As soon as I can move back to the rooms you’ve graciously allowed me to use,” he begins.

“That won’t be allowed for some time, I would think -- it’s not up to me, you understand. The doctor has said, and I concur with her, that you must sleep properly and your muscles must be supported properly. So it will be these soft cushions for now.”

He pretends to sigh, and give in like a churl. “If you insist,” he says, playing that he’s worrying at the quilt, though the stitches are too fine for his human hands to fray.

Her quiet laugh is his reward, and out of the corner of his eye he can see how she covers her smile with her hand.

She makes him bold enough to reach out and hold her free hand in his.

He would never imprison her, he hopes, as he turns her hand over and studies the lines in her palm.

“Cassian.”

Just his name, just those unvarnished sounds, and he wants to lay his head in her lap -- 

But he can hear the great front door as it opens and then closes, and before she can hear the footsteps coming closer he is already pressing a fleeting kiss to her fingertips.

He replaces her hand upon her skirts, withdraws his own.

He has a little strength in him now, so he reaches for the tray of delicacies next to the teacup and the teapot, and he tries to remember his manners as he offers her the slice of cake that must have been waiting patiently for her all this time, and keeps the dark-crumbed roll for himself.

By the time the knock on the door comes, he is properly looking away from her, and she is properly standing in the corner of the room, far away, as distant from him as the stars.

Here is Bodhi and here is the doctor. “Mr Andor,” she says.

“Doctor Tano,” he says, and he shakes her offered hand. 

“I hear you’ve done yourself a minor injury, or perhaps half a dozen.”

He offers her a close-mouthed smile. Motions to his middle. “I seem to be healing.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” and she does examine his wounds, but she is almost brisk about it, and mixed in with that briskness, the care in her hands.

Curiosity is the spike that twists her mouth in its usual small smile, but for some reason she doesn’t press him at all, as she has not done in these few meetings. 

She must be curious about the long scar that neatly divides his chest in two, but wrack his brains though he might to remember, she has never asked him a single question about the matter.

Sting of the dressings being changed.

When all is said and done, she nods at Bodhi. “I would suggest that which you brought might be helpful.”

He’s trying to put his shirt back on, and then his vest -- but Bodhi stays him. “That’s constricting,” he says, motioning to the double row of buttons. “Not good for you. Try this instead.”

A cloud of gray material in his arms, and he can feel the texture of the yarn, the way it’s been looped and twisted into its stitches. The braids, or cables, running down the sleeves, and the ribbed texture of the cuffs. 

He unfolds the yarn-object and finds the neckhole, finds the large wooden button. 

“Do you need help?” Bodhi suddenly offers.

He shakes his head, once, and grits his teeth. Steels himself for pain -- quickly tries to pull the jumper on -- 

“Does it pain you?” The doctor has found the other teacup, and is pouring something from the flask in her hand into it.

Cassian shakes his head. 

The only thing he’s staring at is the size of the jumper: while it sits on his shoulders well enough, and while the sleeves don’t fall too much past his fingertips, it does seem to be too long. Were he standing, its hems would fall well past his hipbones. “This is -- for someone much taller than I to wear,” he says.

“Does it not suit?” Bodhi asks, and he doesn’t wring his hands, because he can hear that it’s Jyn who’s doing so. He can hear the movement of the hands that she’s got hidden behind her back, the strain in her skin and in her sinews.

So he wants to soothe both of their feelings. “It’s very comfortable,” he says, and truthfully at that.

Bodhi beams so much that the corner of the doctor’s mouth twitches as she takes her leave. “I would advise you to stay off your feet for the time being, if you can, Master Andor,” she says at the threshold. “Though my own eyes have given me the evidence of your ability to heal quickly, I would still not beg for trouble by attempting to overstrain that ability. I cannot see what will happen should that unfortunate circumstance come to pass, so best not to even approach it. Put it out of your mind. Are we clear?”

Cassian knows that when he nods, it’s the man who’s trying to understand the doctor’s words -- but what value can those words have to the beast within him?

“I must go,” Bodhi exclaims after a moment, as he peers at the watch that he’s produced from his pocket. “The next set of services will begin soon. I want to speak to Widow Naberrie before anything else happens.”

“Is it about the next charity market?” Jyn asks.

Cassian blinks at her, both completely unsurprised and taken aback.

“Yes,” Bodhi says. “Do you feel you might be able to join in this year?”

A shadow falls over her eyes, her brittle little smile. “I cannot make promises. But I can always give money, as I have done before.”

“She will surely ask about your presence.”

“You know where the difficulty lies.”

Bodhi’s coaxing smile vanishes entirely. “I do, don’t I? Would that things were easier for you. Were gentler. You of all of us would deserve it.”

Cassian looks away when the two of them embrace, but only to give them their privacy.

“And you,” he hears Bodhi say. “I do not forget that you, too, are in no ideal situation.” 

Cassian takes the hand that he’s offered to shake. “I do what I can to contribute -- but I, too, have my difficulties.”

“Well aware are our fathers of that. We will impose no requests on you for tonight. And I might hope that none would come here to threaten the house, if you were here to watch over it in the dark hours.”

“I’m ready to help,” Cassian says.

“I know. But help yourself before you stand to help us.” Another handshake, and then he’s rushing off.

He’s left staring at his hands, not sure he’s imagining the grotesque stretching of the skin to reveal the beast’s sinews and claws, its rough bristling fur -- 

“Cake?”

He blinks.

And Jyn is indeed holding out a slice of cake to him.

“I wouldn’t dream of depriving you of your breakfast,” he says, still staring.

“I can hardly imagine that two rolls would be enough to satisfy your hunger.”

“Please don’t make fun so,” he mutters.

“I’m not. I’m only trying to follow the doctor’s orders.”

He looks her right in the eyes, and he knows she won’t flinch away from him, and his hand is halfway to her cheek before he can stop.

So she smiles, and takes his wrist in her hand. Pulls on him, till his fingertips brush her cheek. “You know I have no intentions of hurting you with my words. That would be beneath you, and it would be unworthy of me. I know you are used to licking your wounds alone. That is something I know well enough in my way. But here, you don’t have to be alone.”

“You have welcomed me into your home.” He strokes his thumb along her chin, and drops his hand. Nods. “You will be calling for a delivery of food.”

“As I always do. Will you wait for me here while I see to it? Rest. I will read to you when I return.”

He always expects her hand to be cool when she brushes it over his brow, because of the pale light in her depthless eyes.

But her skin burns almost feverish against his, as warm and comforting as the tea, as the jumper.

“Such eyes you have,” he says, before looking away.

“And you.” 

Press of her mouth against his cheek.

That, too, is warm.

Perhaps he’ll try to coax her into eating breakfast with him, when she rejoins him: he’ll set aside an egg for her, and certainly some of the good bread she might bring.

And he’ll be lucky, he thinks, if he can persuade her to try the coffee again, even if that means he has to drown the cup in sugar.

For her sake, he’ll do it.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so it's a 'verse now. :)
> 
> Look me up on tumblr [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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